Posted
by
timothy
on Friday July 30, 2010 @12:57AM
from the sorry-kids dept.

astroengine writes "Sure, we're looking 172 years into the future, but an international collaboration of scientists have developed two mathematical models to help predict when a potentially hazardous asteroid (or PHA) may hit us, not in this century, but the next. The rationale is that to stand any hope in deflecting a civilization-ending or extinction-level impact, we need as much time as possible to deal with the threatening space rock. (Asteroid deflection can be a time-consuming venture, after all.) Enter '(101955) 1999 RQ36' — an Apollo class, Earth-crossing, 500 meter-wide space rock. The prediction is that 1999 RQ36 has a 1-in-1,000 chance of hitting us in the future, and according to one of the study's scientists, María Eugenia Sansaturio, half of those odds fall squarely on the year 2182."

Suit yourself. I fully intend to be not just alive, but enhanced beyond all the current boundaries and limitations of our ape heritage by then.Heck, with any luck I'll have ditched the last of the organic crap at that stage.

I seriously doubt it. Humans are adaptable. Sure, we may go into another Dark Age in the next century or so, but the issues you show concern over would fall pathetically short of causing our extinction.

Well, some potential, unfortunate combination of the few factors he mentions perhaps has a slight chance of ending in something quite, hm, entertaining [wikipedia.org];p (especially if coupled with unavoidable, in such case, massive unrest)

Not immediately but quite possibly it could indirectly. All the trivially accessible minerals, oil etc have been consumed. Another dark age and we're likely stuck there indefinitely, possibly forever since we wouldn't be able to boot strap through the equivalent of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

Getting stuck in that state may prevent our ability to overcome the next hurdle. We're smart but we need resources.

It's hard to imagine a pre-industrial world being able to make (or even discover) ethanol fuel without oil-powered industry behind them. Keep in mind that humans have been around for many thousands of years and only in the last few decades have we discovered that all this corn lying around is good for fuel. It takes an advanced level of technology to exploit more subtle resources like ethanol.

Not only you. The whole human species would be extinct by then. We have global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption. These are enough to finish us by 2100. What happens in 2182 is irrelevant.

Dammit, and 2182 was finally going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!

Not only you. The whole human species would be extinct by then. We have global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption. These are enough to finish us by 2100. What happens in 2182 is irrelevant.

Not really.
The human race started off as a primitive ape like species.
We managed to survive living in jungles, deserts and caves.
How is "global warming, pollution, fuel shortage, wars, corruption" going to kill ~7bn people.
Sure it might kill 3 billion or even 4 billion at the very worst (which is still unlikely)
But there is no way any of the things you mentioned will kill every single human being.

Apparently you're unaware that life existed on Earth in radically different atmospheric conditions (prokaryotic life was kickin' it old school in an atmosphere with practically no oxygen at all), that life itself is responsible for changing the atmosphere (photosynthesis caused the oxygen catastrophe killing most of the anaerobic life, but not all of it mark you well, dunce), and that unless all the oceans freeze or boil off into space, it's only a matter of metabolizing different dissolved gases by a new

1) The "business as usual" scenario is 3.5C rise by 2100, not 1C in a few hundred years. In fact, there's enough inertia out there just from what we've already emitted to rise more than 1C by 2100.

2) The primary "end of all life" concern is that we'll trigger what happened on Venus here on Earth -- a runaway system with self-feedback mechanisms, wherein we reach a tipping point from adding more carbon that leads to continually more to enter the atmosphere and/or less to leave the atmosphere. At this point

1. Global warming and even cooling happened in the history of the earth numerous times and apes/humans evolved and or survived.
2. Pollution is bad, but realize that even though today we have been exposed to a record number of carcinogens, the worst case scenario is that we get cancer around the age of 40 on average. That is still plenty of time to reproduce.
3. Due to market efficiency, alternative energy will be used once fuel no longer becomes lucrative or accessible.
4. Wars have less severe ever since

If you think that's enough to completely wipe out our species, I have a bridge to sell you.

It may not be life as we know it, but whether you like it or not humans as a species will survive ALL of that, AND more. All we need is some percentage of newborns to make it to, oh, let's be generous and say age 17. They breed. There's more of us.

You don't need cars, or computers, or even a houses to have humans. All you need is sharp, pointy sticks, a few friends, and some of those friends to be of the opposite sex. That's it.

Exactly. If anything, it could almost be argued that the pollution in late 19th-century Britain, France, and Germany (and parts of America, for that matter) were noxious/toxic enough to make the most badly-polluted square mile of China look like the Garden of Eden by comparison. At least people in China don't have to rely on wood and coal-burning stoves & fireplaces for cooking and heating ON TOP of the pollution being produced by factories (at least, urban factory workers who live amidst the worst pollution) don't.

As a species, humans are easy to kill individually, but surprisingly difficult to effectively exterminate. The dinosaurs didn't have preserved food, hydroponics, artificial lighting, and global distribution networks, so when the skies went dark and 99% of photosynthesis shut down for a few years after the impact event, they were screwed. A similar event would be an unprecedented human tragedy, but the likelihood of enough humans surviving to repopulate the Earth eventually is practically assured.

I imagine some people have, or plan to have, children which they will have some degree of fondness towards. As it may effect their children, or their children's children, it might be of some concern to you.

Also, I'm pretty sure an unusually high percentage of Slashdot readers are not planning on dying. I mean, that's pretty much what science is for, right? I'm very concerned about how this asteroid will affect my robot-body . . .

Also, I'm pretty sure an unusually high percentage of Slashdot readers are not planning on dying. I mean, that's pretty much what science is for, right? I'm very concerned about how this asteroid will affect my robot-body . ..

Sad reality: if the robot-body technology WAS developed within our lifetimes, the vast majority of us couldn't afford it. That's going to be the ugly truth when it gets here: "immortality" will only be for the rich. The rest of us will live and die like we always have.

That said - 500 meters? That's enough to cause some SERIOUS devastation, but it's not an extinction event impact. 6 miles wide killed the dinosaurs, but didn't wipe out EVERYTHING. This is 0.3 miles wide. As long as civilization as a whole goes on then I'm not TOO worried. Afterall, if they fail to successfully deflect it, the survivors could look at it as a learning experience.

Sad reality: if the robot-body technology WAS developed within our lifetimes, the vast majority of us couldn't afford it.

Oh I'm sure that banks will be willing to give you a loan to purchase (or better still - rent) your immortal robot-body, after all - you are going to have hundreds of years to pay it off.
I know some executives who would salivate at the idea of having an indentured workforce like that.

"I've actually had this same discussion with some fellow business people and we all concluded that if indeed technology that gives eternal life is developed, it will be affordable for everyone that is able to work."

Current facts seem to disprove your point. Corporations prefer young people: more naive and with less social ties; they are more willfull to work long hours for peanuts.

"is how you force people to pay rent for their body with eternal life, if they refuse to?"

I personally am pretty confident that cryonics works. Yes, I have a degree in a related field and I am working on an MD. When I say "works", I mean that if a patient is frozen with a well oxygenated brain within a short time period following legal death (the heart stops), and cryoprotectants are used, then I am confident that nearly all personality and memories are preserved.

The person needs to be kept cold for 100-200 years. Already, there are people that have been kept frozen for 40 years, so this is not implausible.

Until the first person has been woken up from cryonic "sleep", I think it is silly to have any kind of confidence in it. But everything will be wonderful when the cargo comes, right?

Simply making a comparison to a cargo cult might be rhetorically fun but it doesn't actually help. First, almost no one is claiming that they have high confidence in cryonics. Indeed, most proponents of cryonics estimate fairly low chances of it working. For example, Robin Hanson estimates around a 5% chance that cryonics will actually work http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/break-cryonics-down.html [overcomingbias.com]. Indeed, when proponents have low confidence like this, claiming that there's a cargo cult mentality fails

Unfreezing is a conceptually simple thing to understand, although of course we are missing the tools to do it today. But we can describe how the tools would work, and point to existing examples of such tools in nature to state with near absolute certainty that such tools are possible and practical.

The tools we need used to be called "nanotechnology", now are called "molecular manufacturing". We need the technology to make any arbitrary object atom by atom, and it's pretty straightforward from there.

Freezing is not the problem, thawing is. Also, do these cryoprotectants work on cell level so the walls aren't punctured by ice crystals?

Yes, they do. This problem was solved for in the late 90s by using much more advance cryoprotectants which allow the body to vitrify at low temperatures rather than freeze. This has been true for about a decade now. Indeed, they've now successfully brought rabbit kidneys down to liquid nitrogen temperatures and brought back up, transplanted them, and had the kidneys function. See http://www.cryonics.org/reports/Scientific_Justification.pdf [cryonics.org] which includes discussion of this and other research (including direct examination of vitrified rat brains which show the cellular and synaptic structure largely intact.)

What good does it do to help your kids out if your existence is permanently terminated and you cannot appreciate the results of your actions? Most advocates of cryonics are either atheists or people who rationally suspect that death might actually be as permanent as it appears, with no form of afterlife.

Cryonics : by preserving the information in the brain it should be possible for future people to rebuild a person or to copy the information into another form.

As you increase the length of a mortgage the cost asymtopically approaches that of an interest only mortgage. In other words beyond a certain point (exactly what point depends on the interest rates) increasing the length of a mortgage will have negligable impact on the monthly cost of the mortgage.

As long as civilization as a whole goes on then I'm not TOO worried. Emphasizes of "civilization" is mine...But you should be worried, perhaps mankind would survive, but the civilization "as we know it" certainly not. A few years of "nuclear winter" will cause havoc to our civilization, hunger, no flights, perhaps no sea travel either and possible break down of our energy provision and gone is our "industrial age".

You can bet on some unrest, but it won't help much with scarcity - which, for a long time, won't have anything to do with resource scarcity - doing complex things takes time, attention of many people, etc. Now compare such realities with the typical number of people dying every day (a number which will only go up). Throw in some groups wanting to ban it and/or destroy what's already there. And hey, most of the world has some funny ideas, due to fear of death, all the time; at least with the ironic case, tha

At that point, basically any really conceivable (to us) notion of "immortality"...most likely loses meaning. Probably at least to the point which makes the present state, "we live forever in what we do, what we leave behind", damn close.

"Think of your children" also doesn't convey properly the scales, the stakes involved - most recent common ancestor of us all lived basically in historical times, possibly in Antiquity or so. If looking just at a group like "europeans and those at least partially descended from them", it's a matter of millenium. Even with low fertility rates, quite a lot of people could carry traces of your DNA in 2 centuries; with greater mobility nowadays... Not to mention the possibility for huge number of "spiritual des

I don't care if they have my genes, I just don't want humanity to get wiped out. If they do, then who will resurrect everyone who ever lived using their fantastic near-magic technology in the far-flung future? Humanity going extinct really messes with my plans to live forever.

Well, we should be concerned about what happens to our home planet, right? If you knew for sure that an asteroid would cause the extinction of humanity on Earth in the year 2182, and we failed to prevent it, would you care? Anyways, I'd rather we have as much time as possible to deal with potentially fatal threats to our species, and hope that we have the science by then to either deflect the asteroid or preserve Bruce Willis.

You really think Congress is that farsighted? No, it will be the Congress of 2181 that grants the money to save us all. Hopefully by then companies like SpaceX will finally have moved us beyond '60s space travel technology.

I bet the odds of hitting the small black hole originated in one of the LHC sucessors will be far lower than 1 in 500. And if we avoid that disaster, a far worse one awaits us the 50 years previous of that event: remakes, sequels, prequels, reboots and so on of the Armaggeddon movie. Probably won't be any (sane) human alive after that.

Any large enough company would have the resources to divert the asteroid. It would be in their interest to extract as much money or property as possible as payment. As long as the asteroid has not been fully diverted and as long as they can still divert it to hit the earth, they can extract monthly payments. It will be in their interest to indefinitely keep the asteroid in an orbit where it can target the earth. Since everyone will have to pay or die we'll all be slaves to Sony, Microsoft and Intel, just li

The wealthiest person who wants to continue living on earth without the threat of being smashed by a giant rock from space can finance a project to deflect the object. Alternately, a consortium of those with means can pool resources to create said project. (And it would probably cost less and be more innovative and more efficient than a government option because people tend to care more when they are spending their own money.)

The funny thing is there really isn't anything special about government that any

Statistically, we've probably discovered 1% of the potentially hazardous asteroids. Now we have a data point for an interesting occurrence: one of the ones we know about has a good chance of hitting us. What about the rest of them?

Actually there are many objects we are monitoring, please see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/risk/ [nasa.gov].This object's impact probability is 7.1*10E-4. That's 0.00071, and not 1/1000.The Torino Scale Color says white, which means impact is almost impossible.Most of the times even if the probability is increased, it is quickly reduced after some investigation.Currently the most dangerous object is 2007 VK184 (2048-2057) which gets green rating. This article is nothing more than sensationalist and stupid.

But it has no torino scale entry because the torino scale is only defined for impacts in the next 100 years. Hence it is listed as n/a.

And the impact probability you cited is the cumulative probability of 8 events. There is only a probability of 5.4E-04 (1/1850) of an impact in 2182.

I don't quite get the publicity at the moment. It has been at that level for quite a while and is still at a much lower level than (99942) Apophis was (which hit 1% chance). In all likelihood new data will rule out an impact.

And the 10 ways of "deflecting an asteroid" are a collection of how not to do it*. The real solutions are to either slow it down or accelerate it, and let it miss Earth before or after it is crossing Earths way. That can be done for example by attaching a rocket to it.

--* Except for paintingBreaking it apart with a nuke: Hard to do, creates more asteroids.Attaching a net/sail: Hard to do, asteroids are not static objectsMirrors/Lasers pointing at it: You need to shoot them up and aim correctly (which is alr

A rock like this heading to our planet and we've got plenty of time to not just deflect the thing, but to move it into Earth orbit where it can be mined, turned into an outpost, and be used as a tether for a space elevator.

Maybe not - if you're the kind of civilisation that can apply enough delta-v, to such body, to capture it safely into MEO, you might be high enough on the Kardashev scale to not care much about such exercises. If not high enough - it's probably better to move some bootstrapping machinery towards the asteroid; avoids Kessler Syndrome where you really don't want it, too (minining in basically 0g could be a bit messy)

You have 1 in 5,000 chance of a car accident today, while 172 years from now a 1 in 1,000 chance of world wipe out. That is a significantly high chance of extinction! And where I live is a 1 in 101 chance of being in a car accident:( [timeslive.co.za]

Hopefully with development of better models, telescopes, etc, etc we can track asteroids extremely far out and get a good feel for if there will be impacts. As stated, it is the kind of thing that could take a long time. So, if you know about one 200 years in advance, no problem. You wouldn't do anything about it now, as such an object would be very far away. But it lets you start planning, and knowing when those plans need to be put in to action. When it is 30-50 years out, maybe that's when building start

Better telescopes is moot. Figuring out the position and velocity of any specific detectable object in the solar system has been trivial for a long time now. The problem is our ability to predict how it will interact with every other body in the next hundred years. If it was a comet, and ignoring any potential flybys of smaller planets, just calculating how it will interact with Jupiter and the Sun every year for 100 passes adds more than a few earth diameters of uncertainty to the results.

We cannot predict the course of asteroids over 200 years to within an Earth diameter. I have worked on this area, and the masses and positions of bodies (particularly all of the other asteroids) are simply not well enough known. So, it will come near the Earth, but we won't know if it is a true threat for at least a century.

Whatever happens I'm going to check out of here long before the PHA, and hopefully long before the PHB from hell turns up. (Got a few PHB's around but they're of the manageable kind - just listen, nod, say yes and then go back to doing what ever you had in mind before they decided to part some sage-like wisdom (only problme is the sage in this case is a small somewhat bedraggled herb rather than a wiseman))

but if it happens that nothing happens in 2012, i'm sure someone will say there was a slight error in the calculations and say the asteroid will cause the end of the world. after all, what's a couple hundred years on a time scale of thousands of years?

It either hits, or it does not, and the actual outcome is 100% certain right now. ONLY we can not calculate it right now exactly. So I assume they are pretty sure the asteroid will miss, but give it a 1 in 1000 chance that they are wrong in that conclusion.

The odds are based on the accuracy of the orbit of the asteroid. Every observation has an error and the orbit can be any orbit that fits in these errors. The errors in the future positions of the asteroid increase exponentially and it is not that exceptional that they can predict this event. Another impact candidate is 1950 DA, which has a 1/300 chance of hitting Earth on March 16, 2880.

The come up with these odds by running tons of simulations taking into account the gravity of the Sun, all planets and some of the larger asteroids. This gives a set of possible paths of the asteroid through the Solar System in the future. The odds of the impact are then the number of possible orbits intersecting the surface of the Earth (including the lower atmosphere) divided by the total number of orbits. This is not magic nor arbitrary, but applied physics.

C3-PO's odds would probably be based on the number of ships ever entering an asteroid field and coming out again. In the real world, flying through our asteroid belt isn't that tricky. Current estimates put the odds of a probe traversing the asteroid belt and accidentally hitting something at around 1 in a billion.

Perhaps they came up with a margin of errorGenerally with this kind of thing you don't estimate a hard edged margin of error but rather you estimate a distribution of probabilities, usually a gausian one.

Combine the probailitity distributions of all your inputs and you get a probability distrbution for your output.

I'd agree about taking the numbers with a pinch of salt though since doing it well is reliant on having good knowlage of the error distributions of all your measurements and calculation methods.